Well, I give up. No, I am not giving up on scoring, not at all. Rather, on the contrary, it is time to move to a point system for the very reason I was worried about. In the end of my previous post about my scoring system – I remarked these words:

In the end, there will be far more A- wines out there, from here on out. Instead of having 91 or 92 or 93 wines out there, there will be lots of just A- wines. To get to A- to A (a 94 or so, that will require a very unique wine indeed.

My prophetic words were in the first sentence of that paragraph – there are too many A- wines. Now, I am not complaining about an A- wine, we need more of them! What I am complaining about is that a 90 scored wine is not the same as a 93 to 94 scored wine – not at all! Sure, even in the default 100 based scoring system, there is a difference between 90 to 94 and 95 to 100 (AKA, there is an A-, A- to A, and A tiers). Great! But there is also a very clear difference between the wines inside of the A- tier, otherwise, they would score all the wines 94 and be done with it, which is clearly not the case!

In the end, I have moved from a less clear on valuation (A–, A- and more, A- plus, B++, etc.) to a clear valuation in my first real iteration of defining my scoring system. From there I have evolved to the freedom of full scores. Like I said in my previous post, I harbored the desire to go to a full point system, but I feared the emails and hate. There is already too much hate around scores – but to me, the scores are just a way to tier wines. I just want a better way to tier them. I did this mostly because I had received enough pushback from many telling me that there were too many B+ or A- wines and all of those wines in those tiers were not alike.

So yes, I will get hate – lots of hate, I know, this has been a move that was a long time coming. For now, there will be a mix of letter scores and numbers, but not within the same article/post. I will decide when are where I will use numbers and/or letters. Either way, the levels have not changed, the criteria have not changed, all that changes, in some cases, will be that I am finally free to score a wine in its true value, instead of being stuck with a tier.

So here is my version of the scoring system (a take on the 100 point scale).

• C (79 and down): Flawed and not recommended at all
• B (80 to 84): Light flaws but find something else preferably
• B+ (85 to 88): This starts to be a wine I would drink, but I would not go out of my way to find and buy
• B+ to A- (89 to 90): I would drink this and if the price was good I may go and buy it as well
• A- (91 to 93 or 94): These are wines I like and do stock in my home
• A- to A (94 to 98): These are top of the line wines to me that are truly special
• A (99 to 100): These wines are as close to Classic as I could see
• A+ (this really does not exist): I have had one of these in my life – the 99 Giraud, and that was more an experiential score than a real 100 point score, but these will be far and few between.

QPR

Separately, I get all this flak around QPR – Quality to Price ratio. Meaning a wine that is priced well for its quality. You can have a very expensive wine that is worth every penny, like the 2014 Chateau Giscours or Malartic, but they are not a QPR wine. Why? Simply said I have an issue with expensive wines, meaning wines over 50 dollars. Do I love some of them? Very much so!

So, the real essence of the argument lies around QPR and if a wine is a CRAZY QPR, or a QPR, or some other adjective. Some have used the statement – It’s like being pregnant, you are or you aren’t

I will admit that QPR also needs a leveling – but I am not there right now. So, get over it and we will move on. If you want the latest version of QPR – this post has them, though a year old.